The dead got the right to their voices before you did

On October 7th, someone acting for a dead man sat down at a music generator called Suno and typed his name with spaces between the letters, to get past the filter, the complaint says, along with a few phrases anyone would associate with him.

The machine produced two songs. It titled both of them “He Is Still The King.”11 Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc. et al. v. Suno, Inc., No. 3:26-cv-13398 (N.D. Cal., filed 6 November 2026), as described in the complaint: a test prompt on 7 October 2026 using the spaced-out letters of Presley’s name produced two tracks titled “He Is Still The King.”

A month later, the songs were exhibits. This past week, the estate of Elvis Presley, along with the company that owns his name, several trusts and a row of music publishers, sued Suno in federal court in California over 859 compositions, a saved voice in the app’s library labelled “Elvis,” a track called “Blue Suede Sin Medley,” and what the complaint describes as the theft of “all of the humanity, history, despair, and triumph that constitutes Elvis’ identity.”

The same day, the publisher that owns Eminem’s catalogue filed a second suit over 269 songs. Eminem himself is not a plaintiff. Elvis, obviously, isn’t either.22 The Presley suit lists 859 compositions and five claims (copyright infringement, DMCA §1201 circumvention, DMCA §1202 removal of rights information, Tennessee common-law right of publicity, and the ELVIS Act). Eight Mile Style, LLC et al. v. Suno, Inc., No. 3:26-cv-13399, lists 269 compositions and three claims. Reported by Bloomberg Law, 9 November 2026. The quoted phrase is from the Presley complaint.

The Elvis complaint asks for up to $128 million in copyright damages and another $50 million for the use of his identity.

Then, on page after page of twenty-first-century law about training data and stream-ripping, it asks for one more thing: treble damages under a Tennessee statute that protects the rights of people who served in the armed forces. Private Presley, 1958 to 1960.33 Damages as pleaded: up to $128.85 million in statutory copyright damages, more than $50 million in publicity-related damages, and treble damages under Tennessee’s provision for members of the armed forces. Pleaded maximums, not findings.

Elvis has been dead for forty-nine years.

§ The right to your face was invented for the living

Start in Rochester, New York, in 1902, where a teenage girl named Abigail Roberson found her portrait on twenty-five thousand posters for a brand of flour.

The only problem is that she hadn’t been asked.

She sued, and the state’s highest court told her there was no such thing as a right to your own face.44 Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co., 171 N.Y. 538 (1902). New York enacted Civil Rights Law §§50–51 in 1903. The public outcry produced the first privacy statute in America the following year. The right began as a right of the living, and a narrow one: to be left alone.

In 1953, a federal judge turned it into property. The case was about baseball cards, two chewing-gum companies fighting over the exclusive use of players’ pictures, and Judge Jerome Frank, needing a name for what the players had sold, called it “the right of publicity.”55 Haelan Laboratories v. Topps Chewing Gum, 202 F.2d 866 (2d Cir. 1953).

Once a thing is property, it can be sold, and once it can be sold the question is whether it can be inherited.

For a quarter of a century, the courts said no.

In 1979, the heirs of Bela Lugosi lost a suit against Universal over Dracula merchandise: the right, the California Supreme Court held, died with the man.66 Lugosi v. Universal Pictures, 25 Cal.3d 813 (1979). In 1980, the Sixth Circuit said the same about Elvis. Three years after his death, his estate was fighting a Memphis foundation over who could sell his likeness, and the court ruled that Elvis Presley’s right to be Elvis Presley had expired with him.77 Memphis Development Foundation v. Factors Etc., Inc., 616 F.2d 956 (6th Cir. 1980).

The Tennessee legislature overturned that in 1984 with the Personal Rights Protection Act. It was written, in every way that mattered, for one estate. California did the same thing for Lugosi’s heirs and everyone else’s the same year. The dead did not win their property in court. They won it in the legislature, after losing in court, because an estate is a very good lobbyist and a dead celebrity is a very sympathetic one.88 Tennessee Personal Rights Protection Act, 1984 (Tenn. Code §47-25-1101 et seq.); California Civil Code §990, enacted 1984, now §3344.1, with the post-mortem term later extended to seventy years.

That was the first time Elvis wrote the law.

§ The consensual dead

What followed was thirty years in which the dead performed, with permission.

Natalie Cole sang Unforgettable with her father’s 1951 recording in 1991 and the album won seven Grammys — it was an absolute blockbuster that nobody took issue with.

But this isn’t always the case. After all, people have a complicated relationship to celebrities that meant something to them.

Case in point: Fred Astaire danced with a vacuum cleaner in a 1997 Super Bowl ad. His widow had licensed it; his daughter hadn’t been asked, and said so. Two years later the same widow got California to tighten its statute — not against ads like hers, but against anyone using him without her signature.99 The Dirt Devil advertisement aired during the 1997 Super Bowl; Ava Astaire McKenzie objected publicly. Robyn Astaire lost Astaire v. Best Film & Video (9th Cir. 1997) over dance-instruction videos, and the Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act of 1999 removed the film exemption and extended the post-mortem term to seventy years.

Tupac Shakur appeared at Coachella in 2012, sixteen years after his death, as a projection that said “What the fuck is up, Coachella?” to a festival that didn’t exist when he was alive.

Peter Cushing played Grand Moff Tarkin in 2016, twenty-two years after his funeral, with his estate’s blessing and a younger actor’s body.1010 Coachella, 15 April 2012; Rogue One, December 2016, with Guy Henry performing Tarkin.

Every one of these had a signature on it. The question was never whether the dead could perform. It was who signed, and what they were paid.

Yet one man understood where this was going before the technology arrived.

Robin Williams died in August 2014. His estate plan, it emerged the following year, barred the use of his image, voice and likeness for twenty-five years, until 2039, and assigned the rights to a charitable foundation so that no one could be tempted.1111 The restriction, in a deed filed with Williams’s trust, runs to 2039 and assigns the rights to the Windfall Foundation; reported March 2015. He had seen the decade’s precedents and decided, while alive, to legislate for his own corpse.

Nobody else did. And now it’s becoming a real issue.

§ The voice becomes a file

In April 2023, a track called Heart on My Sleeve went viral with what sounded like Drake and the Weeknd singing a song neither had written or recorded. It was taken down within days. It had made its point: the voice, which had been the one thing about a performer that couldn’t be copied, had become a file.1212 “Heart on My Sleeve,” posted by a user known as ghostwriter977, April 2023; removed from streaming services at Universal Music Group’s request.

Tennessee moved first. In March 2024, it passed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, the first law in the United States to cover A.I. voice cloning, and arranged the words so that the acronym spelled ELVIS.

That was the second time Elvis wrote the law. The first time the law was used, in 2025, it was by Johnny Cash’s estate, against Coca-Cola, over a living man paid to sound like a dead one. Two and a half years after it passed, Elvis’s estate became the first to use it against a model.1313 The ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security), signed 21 March 2024, effective 1 July 2024; Tenn. Code §47-25-1105. The Cash estate’s suit against Coca-Cola, over an August 2025 advertisement with a sound-alike singer, was reported in November 2025.

So the sequence is this: A right invented in 1902 to protect a living girl from a flour company becomes property in 1953, is denied to the dead in 1979 and 1980, is granted to them by legislatures in 1984, is exercised by estates with increasing confidence for three decades, and is extended to the voice in 2024, by a statute named for a man who died in 1977, in time for his estate to sue a machine in 2026.

Everybody got that?

The dead got the right to their voices before you did.

§ Who the dead really are

Here is the part the complaint’s language about humanity and despair doesn’t mention.

The plaintiff that owns Elvis’s name is Authentic Brands Group, a company whose business is licensing the identities of the famous, living and dead: Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Shaquille O’Neal, and the fashion labels and retailers it has bought out of bankruptcy. It is suing Suno for doing, without a licence, the thing it does with a licence. The dead, in this lawsuit, are a portfolio.1414 Authentic Brands Group acquired a majority interest in Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2013. Its portfolio includes the estates of Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali and a stake in Shaquille O’Neal’s commercial rights. A related ABG entity sued Anthropic on 23 October 2026 over 274 Presley-associated lyrics.

And then there’s the matter of whose humanity, history, despair and triumph went into the catalogue in the first place. Elvis’s first single, in 1954, was That’s All Right, written and recorded by Arthur Crudup in 1946. Crudup spent his later years as a farm labourer and died in 1974 still fighting for royalties he never fully received. Hound Dog was Big Mama Thornton’s record for three years before it was Elvis’s, but she died in 1984, the year Tennessee gave his estate the right to his identity, with, by most accounts, very little to show for hers.1515 Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup recorded “That’s All Right” in 1946 and died in 1974; the royalty dispute with his publisher is well documented. Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton recorded “Hound Dog” in 1952; it was a number-one R&B hit in 1953. She died in 1984.

None of this makes Suno right. It does say something about what the law of the dead protects. It protects whoever had the lawyers at the moment the property was defined, and that was never Crudup.

§ Meanwhile, the living lament this stuff

The strangest fact in this story is how little of it applies to anyone who is alive and not famous.

A session singer whose voice is cloned today has, in most of the world, weaker protection than Elvis’s estate.

In the United Kingdom, there’s no right of publicity at all. Rihanna, in 2015, had to stop Topshop selling a T-shirt with her face on it by proving “passing off,” a doctrine designed for people who sell counterfeit sausages, because no English court recognises a property right in being Rihanna.1616 Fenty v. Arcadia Group Brands [2015] EWCA Civ 3. Canada has a common-law tort of appropriation of personality, created in 1973 when a football player’s photo appeared on a Chrysler brochure, and no settled answer to whether it survives death.1717 Krouse v. Chrysler Canada (1973), 1 O.R. (2d) 225 (C.A.); see also Athans v. Canadian Adventure Camps (1977). The NO FAKES Act was first introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2023. The federal bill that would create an American right to one’s own voice has been pending in Congress for three years.

So the right that the ELVIS Act created is, as of this week, a Tennessee right, held mostly by companies, on behalf of the dead, against machines. The living will get theirs later, as usual, and the model for it will be whatever the estates win.

§ The honest counterweight

The estates have a case. The German case against Suno went against it in July; of the three labels that sued in 2024, one has settled for a licence and two are still in court. The outputs in the Elvis exhibits aren’t “inspired by”; a saved voice called “Elvis” is a saved voice called Elvis. And copyright has always outlived its author by design, so that a writer could leave something to her children; the seventy-year term is a policy you can argue with, not a scam.

And there’s a reason the dead got there first: they can’t consent, so someone has to speak for them, and the law had to decide who. The living can at least say yes or no. Until the machines, that was protection enough.

The claim here is narrower than “the estates are vultures.” It’s that a right which began as the dignity of a living girl has, over a century and a quarter, become a property that is most valuable and best protected when its owner is dead, held by whoever bought it, enforced against whoever can be reached. The machine didn’t do that. It just made the voice copyable, which is the one thing the law had never had to think about, and the first people in line with a claim were the ones who’d been waiting since 1984.

§ What stays scarce

For as long as there were singers, the voice was the one thing that couldn’t be reproduced. You could cover the song, buy the publishing, hire the look-alike. You couldn’t make the sound come out of someone else. That scarcity was the only property right a performer actually had, and nobody had to write it down.

It’s gone. What’s left is the paper: the statute, the estate, the saved voice in a library with a name on it, the lawsuit. The voice is free, and the right to it has never been more valuable, and the people holding that right are mostly not the people who had the voice.

Elvis has written the law twice now. Arthur Crudup never got to write anything but the song.

The ledger below makes three claims. The second one is about whether the living catch up.